Pininfarina’s Rolls-Royce Camargue

by Gunnar Heinrich ::: Rolls-Royce Camargue

ONE of the great ox bow lakes in Rolls-Royce design history, the infamous Camargue stands as an example of modernity gone horribly wrong.

A product of ill-advised futuristic thinking and botched market pandering (RR had Yanks squarely in mind), the Camargue was supposed to drag Crewe’s stodgy clientele kicking and screaming into the brave new world that was to be the automotive market circa 1980.

This experiment in client stewardship backfired. Badly.

To depart from in-house tradition, Pininfarina was commissioned to design the 2+2 coupé. The Italians duly tossed aside convention and penned a straight-edged Royce with no rolling fenders or fountains of luxurious chromium. A large grille with a pre-war sized Spirit of Ecstasy were all that identified the Camargue as a Rolls.

Naturally, the RR Party faithful were irate, if not in revolt.  Who but the Italians could dare tilt the famous Greek temple grille forward seven degrees? Or seek to modernize such a classic purveyor of fine chariots in such a devil-may-care way?

And despite the Cast-Iron 6.75 Liter V8 mustering a suspected but not confirmed 240 bhp, the hefty Camargues could only waft to 60 in a breezy 12.8 seconds and  reach (in theory) 128 mph given adequate miles of straight roadway. Hence, no real sporting argument could be made for the coupé.

It’s not all that surprising then that just 531 one Camargues were produced between 1975 and 1986 and only 526 were sold. With currency markets in flux, the Camargue’s price leapt to nearly $600K in today’s dollars; making the odd coupé nearly 50% costlier than the Corniche.

That said, the Camargue counted innovation as a selling point alongside its avant garde style. The Camargue was the first Rolls to feature the split-level automatic climate control system.

Enough to sway critics all these years on? Likely not. But if the Camargue performed in anyway agreeable to Rolls traditionalists, those virtues remain, as one might say, well camouflaged.